Once a fund manager has got the middle office infrastructure in place – the hardware as it were – the logical next step is to work out how best to utilise it. How can the flow of data – and flow of data is not simply the software – be used in a smart, intelligent fashion to bring incremental gains to the way that the manager runs its business?
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With a heavy dose of irony, Robert O’Boyle, Executive Vice President and Director of Sales & Marketing at Liquid Holdings, recalls how last year he commented that all the coverage of the ‘cloud’ was overblown.
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The rise of social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter has been unprecedented over the last couple of years. LinkedIn now has some 313 million users and in Q2 2014 its revenues rose by 47 per cent to USD534m reported the Wall Street Journal on 31 July 2014.
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Varonis Systems is to supply Abacus Group, a provider of hosted IT solutions for hedge funds and private equity funds, with a platform to monitor, manage and capture unstructured data in the Abacus private cloud.
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“It is critical to know that what we’re building is a two-sided network that has benefits both for investors and fund managers,” comments Sam Hocking (pictured), founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Imatchative.
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Linedata has launched Linedata Optima, a suite of business process management (BPM) tools designed for fund accounting and administration and which will run across Linedata’s suite of fund servicing solutions.
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By Gene Ekster – Some historians note that in the 50’s Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, would get into his silver 75hp two-seater airplane and take to the skies to count cars in parking lots with the aim of making better decisions about his firm’s real estate investments. Today investors, with the help of companies like RS Metrics and their satellite imagery product, can scour the parking lots across the globe from their computers and make trading decisions in the spirit of Sam Walton.
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As global banks deleverage and pursue a course of balance sheet strengthening, the opportunities to build exposure to bank debt have become numerous. Loan trading in 2013 rose to USD530bn. According to eVestment, floating rate bank debt was one of the top 10 most searched universes by consultants towards the end of last year.
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EY (Ernst & Young) last year published an operational efficiency survey and in it, they found that 40 per cent of respondents had already outsourced their middle office functions (26 per cent), or planned to over the next two years (14 per cent). Aside from the cost benefits, managers have to demonstrate that their operations are institutional-grade quality. Investors now ascribe the same level of importance to a manager’s operational infrastructure as they do the investment thesis and track record.
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SunGard’s Hedge360, a cloud-based platform that launched in 2012, puts the power of institutional-grade controls firmly in the hands of hedge fund managers as they strive to achieve institutional-grade credibility. The platform supports the full lifecycle of a fund’s activities front through back, seamlessly integrating its full range of solutions from Front Arena, VPM, InvesTier through to risk management via APT.
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Charles River has expanded its Investment Book of Record (IBOR) offering by integrating Interactive Data’s Corporate Actions Service as an integral part of the Charles River Investment Management Solution (IMS).
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New regulations are allowing hedge fund managers and institutional investors to take advantage of fresh opportunities in the Swiss market, from innovative new fund platforms to new fund strategies and structures that provide significant portfolio diversification opportunities... »

The attraction of incubator platforms has increased noticeably in recent years. New hedge funds face a Sisyphus-like task getting up and running as global regulation and compliance pushes costs up, whilst investors simultaneously expect to see institutional quality operations in place from day one.
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Just 20 years ago, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were novelties. Now, after two decades of explosive growth, they are firmly entrenched in the asset management landscape. Total US-listed ETF assets reached a record-setting USD2.0 trillion at the end of 2014, up from USD1.7 trillion a year earlier, and inflows totaled USD244 billion for the year. European ETFs also saw record flows in 2014; they attracted USD61.4 billion in new assets, more than three times the 2013 total.
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